Berkeley: Travel guides give sense of place through the eyes of writers

Annie Nakao, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published 4:00 am, Friday, August 5, 2005

Photo: PAUL CHINN

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Whereabouts publisher David Peattie with some of his guidebooks on 7/26/05 in Berkeley, Calif. Peattie's travel guides have carved out a respected niche in publishing coming out with 12 literary guides to various countries and cities. PAUL CHINN/The Chronicle less

Whereabouts publisher David Peattie with some of his guidebooks on 7/26/05 in Berkeley, Calif. Peattie's travel guides have carved out a respected niche in publishing coming out with 12 literary guides to ... more

Photo: PAUL CHINN

Berkeley: Travel guides give sense of place through the eyes of writers

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When Nguyen Qui Duc was a boy in Vietnam, he would come home from school and stretch out inside a bunker of sandbags in his bedroom. There, shielded from rocket fire, he would settle in and read.

"Those who know Vietnam think of the incredible importance placed upon literature, no matter what time period you lived in, what regime," says Nguyen. "Everybody grows up writing."

It was natural, then, that Nguyen, 47, a San Francisco writer, translator and host of KQED Public Radio's "Pacific Time" program, would become a co- editor of "Vietnam, A Traveler's Literary Companion," published in 1996 by Whereabouts Press ($13.95).

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The tiny Berkeley publishing house has created a niche market by producing, not travel guides, but a literary sampling of translated stories about countries and cities by native writers. Some are by Nobel laureates and luminaries; others have never been available in English before. But they have a common thread.

"These are stories about place," says David Peattie, 43, founder and publisher of Whereabouts. "They provide an accessible window into a country, through its literature."

There are 11 books in the series -- a 12th, on Mexico, is due in October. Although Whereabouts remains a relative blip on the radar screen of American publishing, it has garnered a following among tourists and armchair travelers alike who thirst for a nuanced understanding of far-flung places.

Like Vietnam.

"For the longest time, we've read books about the war and the American experience, but not what the Vietnamese have gone through," says Nguyen, who edited the book with John Balaban. "We wanted to show that the country is a lot more than war."

Whereabouts, also known for its three other literary guides, "Traveling Souls: Contemporary Pilgrimage Stories," "Gay Travels" and "Lesbian Travels," hopes to make a bigger splash with more country editions.

"Japan's due out in the spring, and we're also interested in Morocco and Turkey," Peattie says. "We'd like one on Canada, too."

Good stories, Peattie notes, reveal as much, or more, about a locale as any map or guidebook. To underscore that point, each book in the series opens with a quote by poet Alastair Reid, from "Whereabouts: Notes on Being a Foreigner."

"Coming newly into Spanish, I lacked two essentials -- a childhood in the language, which I could never acquire, and a sense of its literature, which I could."

Of course, that is how Whereabouts got its name.

Peattie's softcover books -- each the size of a small travel guide with geographically arranged stories and a simply drawn map of the locale -- provide a gambol through lush jungles, teeming cities and arid plains.

There is Chilean Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda's "Roaming in Valparaíso," a sumptuous rendering of the "secretive, sinuous, winding" essence of this seaside city, where poverty "spills over its hills like a waterfall."

Nguyen Huy Thiep, arguably Vietnam's preeminent writer, offers "Salt of the Jungle," which unveils the wonders of a rain forest one month after the New Year: "At around this time, your feet sink into carpets of rotting leaves, you inhale pure air, and sometimes, your body shudders with pleasure, because a drop of water has fallen from a leaf and struck your bare shoulder."

And there's Czech novelist Daniela Hodrová's, "I See a Great City," in which a child looks out of a tenement in Prague onto the city's largest cemetery, which, on a candlelit All Hallows Eve, becomes a "transoceanic liner, shimmering with countless points of light, sailing past my window like the boat in Fellini's 'Amarcord.' "

Not all the authors are familiar. The Chile book, for example, does not include acclaimed author Isabel Allende, one of many celebrated writers whose stories did not easily fit the series' criteria for excerptable literature that evokes the external world. That didn't bother Allende, who wrote a blurb for the book, praising it as an "evocative addition to an engaging series."

Although Peattie intuitively pegs his audience as young folks, both in college or just out, and people interested in ecotourism, he has no clue about the demographics of his readership.

"I think it's people who are already in the mind-set of going beyond just being tourists," he says.

"I actually read the Costa Rica book while on my trip there," she says. "It was very evocative -- it really did give me a flavor for the area. And it introduced me to Latin American writers I wouldn't have known otherwise."

Like his offices, Peattie, who is an athletic 6-foot-1, with sandy hair and a boyish air, is comfortably down to earth. He just recently moved to Berkeley with his partner, teacher Tanya Grove, and their daughter, Kylie Grove-Peattie, 12.

"I'm going to miss that bike ride from Richmond," he says wistfully.

Peattie, who was born in Japan, grew up with a larger view of the world, thanks to his father's foreign service duty and the family's consequent globetrotting. He also did his share of bouncing around. After finishing his studies at Penn State and Pomona College in Claremont (Los Angeles County), he lived in Los Angeles and Boston, and in 1979, came back to California where his family roots are.

Peattie was at Ten Speed Press in 1994 when he started Whereabouts with a publishing colleague, Ellen Towell of San Francisco. The idea came up when Towell, then with Berkeley's North Point Press, was planning a trip to Costa Rica.

"When I travel, I like to read something that has to do with the place, but I couldn't find anything," said Towell.

The two decided to fill the need.

"Everyone told us Costa Rica was the wrong volume to start with," Peattie says. "People just go down there to look at birds and do ecotours, they said. Well, we've now sold more than 20,000 copies of that book. It was the right book, at the right time."

Editions on Prague, Vietnam, Israel, Australia, Cuba, Spain, Chile and Italy followed. It was a mix of off-the-beaten path places and popular travel destinations of a young, hip crowd that also likes to read. Peattie even designed the books to have a "Lonely Planet" look.

"Then Sept. 11 happened," says Peattie. "The Amsterdam book came out a month later. It's been our weakest one."

The fall-off prompted Peattie to redesign the books' covers to look more "literary." For example, the Italy edition, published in 2003, has a subdued painterly cover.

There are perennial challenges. It's still a niche market -- America being notoriously inward-looking in its global orientation and translated works still regarded in publishing as troublesome. And there are the high costs of obtaining copyright permission and commissioning a stable of quality translators and editors.

"We've got to sell 5,000 copies just to break even," Peattie says.

He gets some help from Towell, who left the partnership five years ago and is now a West Coast publishing representative who peddles Whereabouts' titles. Peattie also relies on his bread and butter: production services for university presses.

Despite the challenges, he sees only a bright future for his books, and is pushing to get them "mass circulated."

"Once I was on the Chilean island of Chiloé, and I ran into these Australians who remarked, 'We've seen these beautiful mountains. Yet we sense this whole cultural world around us, this human life going on.' "

"I know what they were talking about," Silver says. "You travel in a different country and you don't speak the language. There's this veil over everything. Well, with these books, it's like lifting the veil. That's a deeper idea that's hard to get into a sound bite."